The Red Room at Grill

A cozy venue in Downtown Tucson booking live music up to 7 days a week. It's a great place to hang out and order good food, indulge from a list of delicious beers, and listen to live performances from some of Tucson's (and our nation's) (and other nation's) best. Bartender on duty 5pm to 2am nightly.

The music always starts at about 10:00 pm, unless otherwise noted in the calendar.

Try the tots!

Red Room Booking Manifesto

The Red Room: If It Ain't Broke, Don't Book It.

1) We don't pay, but you get fed delicious food for free, and the drinks are on the house. You are welcome to set out a tip jar and sell merch.

2) We have a decent PA, and mics, and such. You will set up and run your own sound, which is easy. If you steal our mics, we will kill you. It won't satisfy us, but we just won't know what else to do.

3) If you're booked, please let me know before you add another band to the bill. I'd love it if you found a band to split the bill with, but I'm looking too, and it's easy to overbook and suddenly there's five bands with all their gear out on the sidewalk, trying to play at midnight, and presto! I'm the asshole.

4) There are many fine venues that book great indie rock in town. This means that we don't have to, and we generally don't. I would define indie rock as saying that you probably have a very jacked-up MySpace with a huge splash screen with professionally rendered CSS frippery and a million slick-looking pics and videos all over it, and that your albums "drop" instead of get released, and you have a "street team in my market area" and that you are "rising" or "upcoming" and that you have a "strong buzz." We already have a strong buzz, which comes from beer. We love you, but it's not what we do here.

5) VOLUME VOLUME VOLUME! Look at the room! It's tiny, and it's narrow. It's really easy for your great music to become a nightmare of piercing noise (not the good kind) and kill everyone. Please just look at the room, consider the physics, and adjust accordingly. You can get pretty loud if it's a full house, but if it isn't, you must turn down. Nine times out of ten you will still rock our asses, but if your specific sound is built upon the drummer hitting VERY HARD, and if your amp doesn't give you the proper tone unless it's turned way way up, you should not play here. Sometimes that's just how it is. This is very important.

6) Because we're a restaurant (the GRILL), we are also an all-ages venue. This is cool, but just by accident. We don't MEAN to be an all-ages venue. On the music end, we're a bar, and we operate like one. If your crowd is generally underaged, please school them on the importance of tipping the servers and bartenders. They have bills to pay, and this will insure that you are invited back. There's nothing more depressing than a great band whose crowd keeps the bartender busy making milkshakes all night, tips squat, and meanwhile sneaks beers from their 21 year-old friends. We just can't do anything with that. Please teach your young crowd how to be. Everyone will appreciate it very very much.

7) There's a local band who was booked second (of two bands) one night, but they really really wanted to play first, so they showed up early, lied to everyone, set up their gear (only half the band showed up), and played first, just like they wanted to, for one of their girlfriends and for no one else, all while eating our food and drinking our beer. DON'T DO THAT.

8) Send flyers to The Grill, 100 E. Congress Street, Tucson, AZ, 85701. Don't email me jpgs to print up, because I probably won't, on account of I don't have a printer. The Grill does, but I don't work out of there. I am sitting at home with my cat, drinking.

9) The local alt weekly is the Tucson Weekly. The local community radio station is KXCI. Everyone at both those places is awesome. Say hello to them.

10) We are a small, laid back place. We treat you right. We love good music, and we love you. Do not wipe your ass with us, or we will kill you.